84 THE ASCENT OF MAN 



has come. Between the early cell and the infant's 

 formed body, the ordinary observer sees the un- 

 eventful passage of a few brief months. But the 

 evolutionist sees concentrated into these few months 

 the labour and the progress of incalculable ages. 

 Here before him is the whole stretch of time since 

 life first dawned upon the earth ; and as he watches 

 the nascent organism climbing to its maturity he 

 witnesses a spectacle which for strangeness and 

 majesty stands alone in the .field of biological re- 

 search. What he sees is not the mere shaping or 

 sculpturing of a Man. The human form does not 

 begin as a human form. It begins as an animal ; 

 and at first, and for a long time to come, there 

 is nothing wearing the remotest semblance of 

 humanity. What meets the eye is a vast pro- 

 cession of lower forms of life, a succession of 

 strange inhuman creatures emerging from a crowd 

 of still stranger and still more inhuman creatures ; 

 and it is only after a prolonged and unrecognizable 

 series of metamorphoses that they culminate in some 

 faint likeness to the image of him who is one of the 

 newest yet the oldest of created things. Hitherto 

 we have been taught to look among the fossilifer- 

 ous formations of Geology for the buried lives of 

 the earth's past. But Embryology has startled the 

 world by declaring that the ancient life of the 



